Four months. A pandemic. One chart of accounts.

By ·

I came back from stress leave in May 2019.

Five weeks off. The kind of leave nobody talked about at a company growing so fast that the pace itself was a point of pride. When I came back, eight people came to me privately about their own symptoms. None of them had told their managers. I had —and it opened something up.

I came back with conditions. More autonomy. No interference with my team. And a proposal for a mental health policy —which the company implemented.

I also came back ready.

I had spent my first year as Global Head of Accounting building the team —hiring Ikram, Albert, Vincent and Nico across three countries, aligning how we worked. But we were still operating in three different languages. Not metaphorically —literally. A3 in Spain, Sage in the UK, Quadra in France. Three systems, five entities, three charts of accounts, three versions of every number.

When you asked for a consolidated view, you got different answers —each technically correct, none comparable.

The numbers existed. The picture didn't.

It was already June. No ERP chosen yet. My CFO hesitated —four months to start from zero and go live by January? It felt too tight.

I said we do it now.

The team evaluated vendors over the summer and chose NetSuite. I still have the notebooks —my handwritten logs from seven years at Stuart— with the reasons they gave.

In October I gathered everyone in Paris. Four days locked in a room with the NetSuite implementation team —accents flying in every direction, half in English and half in patience. Working through the chart of accounts line by line.

It was the first time my whole team had been in the same room.

Long days. Late nights. Frustration building. One night, the steadiest of them came close to breaking —the one I'd have worried about least.

I was a new manager. I was afraid it would all collapse.

It didn't.

We talked about how hard it was. But we had all decided to do this together —and that held us. Five people. Four months. September through December, year-end close and a group deadline in parallel.

Go live: January 2020. Big bang.

No casualties.

Two months later, the pandemic hit.

We troubleshot in lockdown. Remote team, new system, closing books every month —the kind of pressure that breaks things that weren't built right.

It held.

A year later, Albert, Ikram and Vincent were Chief Accountants. Nico became the Controller.

The hard part was never the system. It was the alignment before the system —getting three sets of habits, priorities and operational realities to converge into one common language.

But that's not what held us through October, through the worst nights in that room. What held us was deciding to do it together —and nobody having to carry it alone.

I'd learned that earlier that year. On my own leave —from eight people who'd carried things alone until I said mine out loud.

The system was almost the easy part.